Mladen Gogala

Introduction

This is my first ever home page so please, don't judge it too
harshly. This page will, of course, be permanently under construction.
I decided to create a home page on the advice of my publisher, Mr. Don
Burleson of Rampant Books in 2006. I wrote a book about Oracle and PHP and
it was published on Friday, August the 4th, 2006. More information about
the book is available at Rampant Press website:
Easy Oracle PHP.
More recently, I also helped write another book, this time as a co-author:
Pro PHP Programming.
The second book was published on August the 15th, 2011 by Apress Publishing. The book covers very interesting topics like mobile computing, agile development, XML and unit testing. I sincerely hope that you will find it enjoyable and useful.

Who am I?

I am a long time Oracle DBA who started to work with Oracle RDBMS in
1989. At that time, I was introduced to Oracle version 4, on PC/XT. It
is very hard to believe that Oracle instance used to fit in only 512 KB
of memory. I worked with every major version of oracle RDBMS since
then. During my lengthy career I performed all kinds of jobs, from
COBOL programmer, VAX/VMS administrator and trainer to Unix system
administrator. As a DBA, I have an ample opportunity to use various
scripting languages like shell, Perl, PHP and awk.

What can you find on this page?

On this page, I made available DBA_Helper, a small collection of PHP5
scripts organized in a convenient DBA tool for performing routine DBA
functions. Initially, it was modeled after Andy Duncan's Orac_DBA tool written
in Perl, but I decided not to create a single, monolithic script for ease of
maintenance. Each line item in the tool is a separate script. That makes it
easy to debug and extend the script as needed. DBA_Helper is released under GPL
and you are welcome to extend it or modify in any way you find useful. If you
have any modifications that you find useful and would like sharing them with
others, please don't hesitate to send them to me and I'll publish them on this
site. This site also contains two articles that I wrote for NYOUG and some
"general purpose" articles written in response to the questions on the Usenet
and various other forums.

Latest Updates

30-AUG-2011
- This is the first update since November 2009. The book I was writing is
now complete, this update is a long overdue.
- There are many functional changes and bug fixes.
- TRCANLZR no longer works, will fix it in the next few days. File name
is not correctly generated.
- Version change to 1.0.30
- Also updated is dump2csv script. I also added dump2xml script, very
similar in nature.
31-AUG-2011
- Added a paper with my experiences with PostgreSQL. I had an ambitions
porting project which was eventually canceled. This is a summary of
what I learned during the course of the project.
- Added PostgreSQL version of the famous SCOTT/TIGER tables.
06-DEC-2011
- Removed obsolete resume. Will update later.
11-FEB-2012
- Version change to 1.0.30
- Added job control functions for DBMS_SCHEDULER and Datapump jobs
- Removed Latches from the "Locks" menu.
- TRCANLZR package and trace analysis works again.
02-APR-2012
- Expensive SQL section rewritten. Now, the tool can show both cumulative
and per execution SQL for the CPU, elapsed time and row processed. It
is now possible to restrict the search on a single schema or schema
pattern. This change doesn't warrant a version change.
07-JAN-2013
- Added DB2 version of the Oracle SCOTT schema. It was created
manually and exported using IBM db2move utility. The schema
contains all the usual suspects: EMP,DEPT,BONUS and SALGRADE.
25-JAN-2013
- Added Perl wrapper for the Oracle Trace Analyzer (TRCA) tool, so
that it can be used from the command line, similarly to tkprof
26-JAN-2013
- Added an article about the native compilation.
- Uploaded DBA_Helper with the fix for ER diagram, which
was failing when using PHP 5.4.

The Tool

The tool is a web based tool utilizing Apache web server and PHP5 to
perform DBA functions on Oracle databases. PHP4 can not be used because
the tool uses exceptions to handle errors and PHP4 does not support
exceptions. The tool supports database version 9 and newer. It was
tested with Oracle v9.2 and 10g. Prerequisites and screenshots are
below.